Unfortunately for our “jeered Will,” as in their usual court-style they call him, he had met with “a foolish mischance,” well known among the collectors of our British portraits. There was a feature in his face, or rather no feature at all, that served as a perpetual provocative: there was no precedent of such a thing, says Suckling, in “The Sessions of the Poets”—
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In all their records, in verse or in prose, There was none of a Laureat who wanted a nose. |
Besides, he was now doomed—
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Nor could old Hobbes Defend him from dry bobbs. |
The preface of “Gondibert,” the critical epistle of Hobbes, 411 and the poems of the two greatest poets in England, were first to be got rid of. The attack is brisk and airy.
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UPON THE PREFACE.
Room for the best of poets heroic, If you’ll believe two wits and a Stoic. Down go the Iliads, down go the Æneidos: All must give place to the Gondiberteidos. For to Homer and Virgil he has a just pique, Because one’s writ in Latin, the other in Greek; Besides an old grudge (our critics they say so) With Ovid, because his sirname was Naso. If fiction the fame of a poet thus raises, What poets are you that have writ his praises? But we justly quarrel at this our defeat; You give us a stomach, he gives us no meat. A preface to no book, a porch to no house; Here is the mountain, but where is the mouse? |
This stroke, in the mock defence, is thus warded off, with a slight confession of the existence of “the mouse.”
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Why do you bite, you men of fangs (That is, of teeth that forward hangs), And charge my dear Ephestion With want of meat? you want digestion. We poets use not so to do, To find men meat and stomach too. You have the book, you have the house, And mum, good Jack, and catch the mouse. |
Among the personal foibles of D’Avenant appears a desire to disguise his humble origin; and to give it an air of lineal descent, he probably did not write his name as his father had done. It is said he affected, at the cost of his mother’s honour, to insinuate that he was the son of Shakspeare, who used to bait at his father’s inn.[327] These humorists first reduce D’Avenant to “Old Daph.”